this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
558 points (97.1% liked)

Fuck Cars

9375 readers
1065 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Like YIMBY said, the short answer is yes. The long answer is that there's a complicated network of subsidies, write-offs, and car-related maintenance, bureaucracy, and clean-up that is supported by the taxpayer and doesn't pay for itself. It's not just repaving roads, which has to happen more and more often as vehicles get heavier and faster (road damage increases quadratically as vehicle weight increases), it's also paying for highway patrol to enforce road safety, paying for first responders to clean up accidents, paying for other maintenance to prevent wildfires and clean up roadside litter (even if you use prison crews, it doesn't cost nothing), paying to maintain other road-related infrastructure like signs and guardrails, as well as the multitude of oil and gasoline subsidies that become more and more important as we become more and more reliant on tractor-trailers to haul goods.

The ten dollars spent by taxpayers for every one dollar of operational cost actually applies to driving cars, I suspect that the cost to taxpayers for long haul trucking is quite larger.